Forrest Bess

Forrest Bess (b. 1911, Bay City, TX; d. 1977, Bay City, TX) was largely a self-taught artist, learning to paint by copying images from books and magazines, as well as works by artists he admired such as Vincent van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Bess studied architecture at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin but left school in 1933 to work in the oil fields at his father’s behest. During World War II, Bess enlisted in the Army but never saw combat; instead, he was assigned to design camouflage patterns. After suffering a psychotic break, an Army psychiatrist encouraged Bess to paint the visions he saw during the intense hallucinations he  experienced throughout his life. Once he was discharged in the mid-1940s, Bess moved to his family’s bait fish camp on an island off the coast of Bay City, TX. He would paint at night, rendering the visions he had just prior to falling into deep sleep. Bess was fascinated by the theories of Carl Jung - in particular, Jung’s insights into the “universal unconscious.” These Jungian theories were a repeated subject of Bess’ inquiries as he strove to unite oppositional states in both his work and life. In the 1950s, following extended written correspondence with gallerist-artist Betty Parsons and art historian Meyer Schapiro, Bess gained notoriety in New York City; eventually, Betty Parsons represented Bess in her eponymous gallery, mounting six solo exhibitions of Bess’ work between 1950 and 1967. 

Forrest Bess’ works have been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY - 1981); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL - 1988); Museum Ludwig (Cologne, DE - 1989), Fridericianum, (Kassel, DE - 2020), and Camden Art Centre (London, UK - 2022). In 2013, the Menil Collection (Houston, TX) hosted a major survey of Bess’s work titled Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliott, which traveled to the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Neuberger Museum of Art, (Purchase, NY), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, (Berkeley, CA). Bess received the Mark Rothko Foundation Grant in 1973. In 2012, Robert Gober presented a room of Bess’s work for the Whitney Biennial, drawing renewed critical attention to the artist. In 2018, Bess was included in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art exhibition, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA). Bess’ works reside in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Menil Collection (Houston, TX), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston TX), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), among many others.